Elites ‘are free to favour multiculturalism without enduring its consequences…’

It is the culture issue that is so intractable. There are places in the UK, France, America and other countries where the existing inhabitants feel they have become strangers in a strange land. The dress is foreign and often scary, the native tongue is unheard on the streets, the odours from the cooking of strange foods are off-putting, children are held back in school by immigrants who do not speak the nation’s language, and the religions practised vary from the merely exotic to the positively threatening.

Perhaps worst of all, this is of little concern to the ruling elites, who rarely live in the affected neighbourhoods, or venture into them (except when searching for votes). They are free to favour multiculturalism without enduring its consequences, and to ignore the fact that new immigrants, unlike previous waves, may have no desire to assimilate into cultures they often find abhorrent. (…)

The hardest part is to persuade the policy-making elites that insistence on assimilation, rather than continuation of the multicultural policies which make them feel so saintly and modern, will alleviate some of the opposition to immigration and cut into the mounting popularity of racist parties.